Centrally manage the system using IBM System Storage DS Storage Manager

Support up to 112 disk drive modules with the attachment of 6 EXP520 expansion units.

Optimised data management requires storage solutions with high data availability, strong storage management capabilities and powerful performance features. IBM System Storage DS5020 Express is designed to provide low total cost of ownership, high performance, robust functionality and unparalleled ease of use. As part of the System Storage DS5000 series storage system, DS5020 Express offers:

Achieve a low total cost of ownership

Facing relentless data growth and shrinking budgets, organisations continue to look for ways to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Utilising 8 Gbps FC connections allows companies to reduce the number of host bus adapters per server and the number of overall ports in their FC storage area network (SAN) infrastructure without sacrificing performance, thus saving acquisition and operational costs.

The system is designed to help you avoid over-configuration for an affordable entry-point while offering seamless 'pay-as-you-grow' scalability as requirements change. Its efficient storage use is designed to reduce raw capacity requirements. The ability to intermix high-performance and high-capacity drives enables tiered storage in a single enclosure. These extraordinary abilities reduce the number of drives needed to meet performance and capacity demands and can significantly reduce acquisition and operational costs.

Common features

Dynamic capacity expansion

System Storage DS Storage Manager Software

IBM FlashCopy to take point-in-time copies of logical volumes

Dynamic volume expansion

VolumeCopy feature designed to provide full replication of one logical volume to another

* Limitation - a maximum of 20 solid-state drives (SSDs) are supported in a DS5020 system (which includes all of the attached expansion enclosures)

Feature

Benefits

Host interface intermix

Support for intermixing FC and iSCSI interfaces allows for cost-effective SAN tiering

Balanced performance

Equally adept at input/output operations per second (IOPS) and megabytes per second (MB/s), DS5020 is able to support applications with wide-ranging performance requirements

Well suited for data warehousing, consolidation and virtualisation environments that have diverse workloads and application requirements

Designed to concurrently support transactional applications, such as databases and online transaction processing (OLTP) and throughput-intensive applications, such as high performance computing (HPC) and rich media

Support for self-encrypting drives

Comprehensive protection for data at rest ensures data is secured throughout the drive’s lifecycle without sacrificing storage system performance or ease of use

Up to 112 intermixed drives

Intermix FC, FDE, SSD and SATA disk drives to enable tiered storage

FC disk is allocated to applications that demand high performance and have high input/output (I/O) rates and less-expensive SATA disks are allocated to applications that require less performance

Up to 336 TB of FC-SAS nearline physical storage capacity, or up to 224 TB of SATA physical storage capacity, or up to100.8 TB of FC-SAS physical storage capacity, or up to 8 TB of SSD physical storage capacity

For a list of currently supported servers, operating systems, host bus adapters, clustering applications and SAN switches and directors, refer to the DS5020 Express Interoperability Matrix.
DS5020 Express is supported only in rack installations. With optional features, up to six EXP520 expansion units can be attached to DS5020 Express up to a maximum of 112 drives.